Ira von Fürstenberg, jet-setting princess and actress, dies at the age of 83

Ira von Fürstenberg, who came as close as possible as an Italian-born princess descended from Charlemagne, an heiress to the Fiat fortune, a Vogue model, a big-screen engineer and a world traveler, a bon vivant, died on February 19 at her home in Rome. She was 83.

Her son, Hubertus von Hohenlohe, said she died after breaking her ribs and perforating her lungs in a domestic accident.

By blending the gilded privilege of the old European aristocracy with the verve of mid-century film and fashion nobility, Ms. von Fürstenberg seemingly defined the term “jetsetter,” bouncing between houses in Rome, London, Paris, Madrid and the shores of Lake Geneva.

“My only real home is on airplanes,” she said. “I spend so much time traveling from country to country that my children suspect I’m actually a flight attendant.”

She shared a surname with famous fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who married the princess’s fashion designer brother Egon in 1969. “When I first met Egon, she was the famous sister,” Diane told Women’s Wear Daily last month. “She was married in Venice and was a movie star.”

The princess boasted both a noble ancestry and a seemingly inexhaustible wealth from her mother, Clara, who was a granddaughter of Giovanni Agnelli, who founded Fiat, and a sister of Gianni Agnelli, the dashing Fiat chief.

Her Paris home even featured solid gold bath taps, because, as she once put it, “everyone needs to see something beautiful in the morning to have a nice day.”

Yet Mrs. von Fürstenberg was anything but content with a life of pampered laziness.

In her many careers she posed for fashion shoots with great photographers such as Irving Penn and Helmut Newton; walked the catwalk in a Mondrian dress by Yves Saint Laurent; appeared in films with actors Peter Lawford and Donald Pleasence; served as an executive for Valentino; and later became an artist himself, exhibit in museums decorative objects made of bronze, rock crystal and semi-precious stones.

Mrs. von Fürstenberg achieved early fame. At the age of 15, she made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic when she married Spanish-born prince and playboy Alfonso Hohenlohe-Langenburg, affectionately known as the King of Clubs for his work in founding the Marbella Club, a haven for stars and socialites. Spanish Costa del Sol.

Due to her young age, she needed a special dispensation from Pope Pius XII to marry the prince, who was 31, but there was little or no scandal. In fact, she graced the cover of Life magazine on October 17, 1955, for what the magazine called “the wedding of the year.”

“All the elements of a medieval romance were present at the wedding – the carpeted palaces, the ladies in tiaras, the gifts of precious silver and precious jewels,” the magazine reported.

Accompanying photos showed the princess in a lace wedding dress, smiling happily next to the neatly moustached groom as they led a fleet of more than a hundred decorated gondolas through the canals of Venice. The celebration lasted more than two weeks and attracted 400 European aristocrats.

Their union produced glittering parties around the world and mingled with the fashion and art elite, including Salvador Dalí – who asked the newlywed princess to pose nude, a request she and her husband quickly rejected. They had two sons, Christoph, who died in Thailand in 2006, and Hubertus, a former Olympic skier for Mexico.

But the good times would not last. In 1960, the couple attracted considerably less favorable press when the princess entered into conversation with Francisco Pignatari, better known as Baby, a Brazilian industrialist and infamous playboy.

An article in Life that year, headlined “A beautiful pickle of a princess,” reported that Mrs. von Fürstenberg “lived modestly in a 17-room hotel suite in Mexico City,” where her husband controlled the Volkswagen franchise for the country .

The prince would not go quietly. One day at four in the morning, the article continued, police officers knocked on the princess’s door to search the suite. Mr. To the rescue came Pignatari, more than twenty years her senior, who was staying on the floor above her. He was briefly imprisoned on charges of adultery, but the charges were quickly dropped due to lack of evidence.

As the couple moved toward divorce, the prince at one point disappeared with the children and dressed them in wigs to disguise them as girls. The princess countered with a nice reward for finding them.

As chivalrous as the Brazilian mogul’s intentions were during the hotel robbery, their love didn’t last long either. The couple married in 1961 in Reno, Nevada, and divorced three years later.

“As a half-child, she had become entangled in a man’s world,” Hubertus said later.

Her survivors include her son Hubertus.

Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galinda von und zu Fürstenberg was born on April 17, 1940 in Rome. Her father, Prince Tassilo Fürstenberg, traced his lineage to the German House of Fürstenberg; her mother was descended from scions of Italian industry.

During World War II, the family evaded hostilities by moving to Lausanne, Switzerland, and later settling in Venice. Educated at boarding schools in Switzerland and England, the princess appeared in public at 13, serving as a swimwear model for a family friend, Italian designer Emilio Pucci. Two years later, photographer Cecil Beaton would portrait of her with flowers in her hair.

After the turmoil of her marriage, Mrs. von Fürstenberg met the film producer Dino De Laurentiis during a flight in 1966. Mr. De Laurentiis was intrigued by her potential as an actress and soon signed her.

The following year she starred in ‘Dead flight”, a spy thriller with Mr. Lawford in the lead role, and in the Italian spy parody “Matchless”, with Patrick O’Neal and Mr. Pleasence in the leading role.

Not all critics were enamored with her performance, with a review from Howard Thompson in The New York Times stating: “A real, sure-enough member of the royal family from the society columns, Princess Ira Fürstenberg, plays a neutral, nonchalant dressed femme fatale. ”

Undeterred, she went on to earn more than two dozen screen appearances until the early 1980s, although she later said she wished she was seen as more than a tawny-eyed temptress. “Directors only look at my belly button, and producers only look at my name,” she once said. Her best chance at a breakout role in “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 epic about St. Francis of Assisi, was cut from the final version of the film.

Still, in a 2019 interview with Sotheby’s, she said she had no regrets about her years in film.

“Maybe I wasn’t that successful” she added, “but I had a great time with my wonderful partners, and there are so many stories from that time that I can’t remember them anymore.”

Towards the end of her life, she looked back with the same fondness on her time in fashion, where she socialized with friends such as Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor, and the designer Karl Lagerfeld, who often stayed with her in her Swiss villa.

With her closets full of designer clothes, she continued to present herself in a way that befits a princess.

As she remembered in one 2019 interview with Vogue: “My father always said, ‘You have to cover yourself.’”